A Journey from This World to the Next, etc. (1743) by Henry Fielding
Structure and Sources
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21250401 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Veronika B Zuseva-Özkan (0000-0001-9537-108X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 126-153 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Studia Litterarum (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2500-4247 • E-ISSN: 2541-8564 |
| Publisher | A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.22455/2500-4247-2025-10-2-126-153 |
| OpenAlex | W4411087447 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 17 |
The article considers the unfinished novel by Henry Fielding, A Journey from This World to the Next, etc. (1743), as a stage in the historical poetics of posthumous narration, i. e., the narration of a character who, in the conventional reality of the inner world of the work, is represented as a dead person. This curious phenomenon, most noticeable in the 20th- and 21st-century literature, has been understudied in the diachronic aspect from the perspective of its genesis and evolution; the article partly fills this gap. The author of this paper analyzes the composition and architectonics of Fielding’s work, and establishes its sources, discusses the reasons for its incompleteness; the novel is compared in detail with the earlier tradition, including “dialogues of the dead,” English pamphlet culture of the 17th century, and the genre of vision. The article concludes that despite the writer’s obvious familiarity with the traditional representation of the afterlife, he creates an individual, “non-canonical” image of the afterlife, and the discoveries he made will be inherited by the modern posthumous narrative. However, the place of Fielding’s Journey in the historical poetics of posthumous narration is also characterized by the incompleteness of the text: the author could not find the form of the whole that would allow the novel to take shape fully. Therefore, A Journey from This World to the Next, etc. appears as the early prototype of the upcoming novel with posthumous narration
Art history · Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor · Performance art · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Australian History and Society · European Political History Analysis · History
| Highly cited | No |
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